In quasi-emulation related news: Star Ocean is done
Well the good folks at Dejap promised a patch by the end of 2003. The evening of December 31, they delivered. The game is in full english, with only a few little piddly things to clean up (hacking the menus to allow more space for item descriptions, hacking the "Yes/No" choice balloons, and other crap I don't care about).
I really gotta commend Dejap for overcoming the extraordinary curcuimstances holding this release back. First was the obvious: The game used the SDD-1 chip, and encrypted/compressed graphics that made it impossible to play on emulators, flash carts, or disk drives, and thus impossible to make a hacked version. They managed to dump decrypted data for all the SDD-1 games, and got all of them working in emulators, and made it possible for others to eventually break the encryption algorithm alltogether.
The second was that this game was a massive undertaking. The script was one of the largest of any RPG on SNES (though still not as bad as, say, TokiMemo) and the game itself was notoriously difficult to hack.
The third, and perhaps biggest obstacle that they overcame was 2 massive data-destroying hard drive crashes that forced them to start over late into the project's life cycle (Way after the first beta release). After people in the community helped them pay for data recovery, they still had to redo much of the script and nearly all of the hacking. Anyone else would have just quit at this point. Dark Force and Tomato both had jobs that kept them very busy.
But it's here. The dubbing project was destroyed, and there's still some minor things undone, but for all intents and purposes, it's a completed project, on time and fully playable. I can't wait to get back into this game, I love it.
DeJap
The Whirlpool
